Spending one year in Silicon Valley can make a big difference in the lives of students about to graduate from university. For then NUS students Siu Rui Quek, Lucas Ngoo and Marcus Tan, their one-year immersion in Silicon Valley would inspire them to use technology to solve problems at a large scale.

Five teams competed in Orange County this past weekend. Particularly notable in this Southern California version of a San Francisco hackathon was a focus on product viability. Teams were here to build a product to sell, not merely to produce an idea without a market.

In every person I had the opportunity to speak with, this same sense of pride and ownership came through; people expressed, over and over, that their personal success rested in the public success of their own community.